Are We There Yet? Appearing In Horror On Holiday from Golden Goblin Press

Oscar Rios and editor Brian Sammons are bringing out a new Lovecraftian anthology from Golden Goblin Press called Horror On Holiday via Kickstarter, so head on over there and kick a buck –

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/horror-on-holiday-tales-of-vacations-taking-very-dark-turns?ref=ksr_email_user_watched_project_launched

Peep the lineup –

A Gilded Butterfly by Glynn Owen Barrass
You Take It With You by Helen Gould
In Light Accessible by John Linwood Grant
Geneaology by William Meikle
A Palette of Honey and Amber by Andi Newton
Castles In The Sand by Peter Rawlik and Sal Ciano
Thin Ice by Oscar Rios
A Kingdom of Magic by Brian S. Sammons
The Isle of Ma’an Du by Sam Stone
The Fun Fair by Tim Waggoner
The Family In The Wood by Helen Yau
Summoning My Soul To Endless Sleep by Lee Clarke Zumpe

My own offering Are We There Yet? concerns a beleaguered father on an extended road trip with his family. They pull into a lonely gas station where the elderly attendant passes a brochure for a chintzy roadside attraction to his excitable son. As the boy becomes more and more obsessed with seeing the dubious wonders promised in the brochure, the father notices the compulsion spreading to the other members of the family, and finally to himself, as a series of increasingly insistent advertisements guide them further and further off their intended route.

Here’s the opening lines –

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Greg Trezvant signaled his exit.

Between Lisa’s shrill screaming over the kids’ cacophony in the backseat and a growing, paranoid suspicion that the GPS was somehow lying to him, the green turnoff sign that promised Gas-Food (probably in the wrong order, Greg reflected) looked like the emerald leaves of a shimmering oasis in an endless desert dotted with No Facilities cacti.

His seven year old, Robert, was pinching himself through his sweatpants and wailing for a toilet in a tone so high and resonating Greg was this close to bleeding out of his ears. A year ago they had had trouble keeping the kid from taking a leak in the bushes in front of the house, but Lisa had discouraged his habit of pissing in the open so effectively Robert was now unable to even fathom jumping out of the car and going in a ditch. Greg had pulled over and physically removed him from the vehicle at one point and yanked down his trousers only to watch his son dance in place screaming until Lisa had loudly demanded they both get back in and stop wasting time.

Jainey was exacerbating things, hollering for her little brother to shut up, presumably so she could hear every minute intonation of whatever was thumping in her earbuds. She was eleven and had apparently outgrown empathy somewhere around her last birthday.

Lindsey’s Filling Station was exactly that. Not a proper gas station, but a throwback to the days of yesteryear when mechanics would answer the ringing of the Milton bell and come swarming over your car to check the fluids and tires. The rusted old Pepsi Cola gas pump had no POS pad in sight, just a handwritten sign that said “Please Pay Inside Before You Pump!”

Inside looked a bit dubious. The building was as old as the gas pump, with thick, dusty glass. There was no chain fast food joint or ice cream place adjoining, but another exclamatory handwritten sign promised “Best Homemade Jerky On The Interstate!”

It was the restroom Robert was interested in, and he and Lisa hit the ground running like a couple of Green Berets disembarking from a Huey. They rushed in, jangling the sleigh bells over the door as it banged open, Lisa yelling, “Bathrooooom?”

Greg saw a gnarled finger on a liver spotted hand reach out and point through the doorway, and his wife and son wheeled and charged down that direction.

He cut the engine with deliberate slowness and turned in his seat, tapping Jainey on the knee to alert her that he was exiting the vehicle.

“Why’re we stopping here?” she shouted.

“Come on. You know why.”

“What?”

He tapped his earlobe and she rolled her eyes and turned down her music.

“I said you know why. Come on. Get out and stretch your legs, hit the toilet. I don’t know when we’ll see another one.”

“Why don’t we ever stop anywhere interesting?” Jainey whined.

Inside, the shelves of the little gas station were packed with crap; dusty quarts of oil, chintzy souvenir keychains and postcards, heaps of salty, sugary snacks. Crap, crap, and made-to-be crap. Jainey drifted in, sweeping the shelves with her bored eyes like a shark bloated from killing but still ostensibly in the market for a stray mackerel.

Behind the register, a long faced old man with a head of wavy, buttercream white hair grinned toothily. He was dressed in bib overalls and a red flannel shirt and a fisherman’s vest covered with a myriad of eccentric pins with pithy, folksy sayings like “Bless Your Heart,” “Southern Pride,” and “Fine ‘N Dandy.” A slat-eyed cartoon goat grinned at him from one of the pins.

“You the fella owns that thunderstorm that swept through here a minute ago?” the old man asked.

Greg held up his hands sheepishly.

“I just hope he didn’t drop any rain between here and your restroom.”

There was a loud industrial flush from a back hall.

“No, no, I think he made it alright,” the old man said with a laugh.

A door rattled open and Robert came skipping out as if nothing had ever been the matter. Lisa was in tow, looking haggard.

“Where you all headed?”

“Buckingham,” Greg said, fumbling for his wallet, figuring he’d fill up while everybody else drained.

“Vacation?”

“Yeah mainly, trying to get these guys out to see the sights. Get a little bit of nature. But you know kids. Everything’s boring. They hardly look out the car window.” He slid a twenty across the counter.

“Buckingham don’t hardly seem much of a vacation spot,” said the old man.

“Well, I’m headed over to the historical society there. Got an appointment with the curator.”

“You interested in history, huh?”

“Guilty,” said Greg. “This is actually family history. I had a great great grandfather, fought in the Civil War, went missing in action somewhere around here. At least, to me. See, I know what outfit he was in, that he was around here, but don’t know what happened to him. Thought it’d be fun to do some digging.”

“Fun,” said the old man, a little dubiously, doling out angel wings on the cash register. “For you. But how about them? Ya want my advice, don’t forget the ‘family’ in family vacation. Kids need to have their interests courted. Wife too,” he added, nodding to Lisa, who was perusing the magazine rack with the same dull expression as Jainey. “Got to appeal to the whole family unit or it ain’t really a family vacation….”

The Isle of The White Lady in Tales of Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/britannia-and-beyond-a-regional-guide-for-cthulhu-invictus

Golden Goblin Press is running the Kickstarter for their book Britannia & Beyond, a Roman setting campaign supplement for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game and the newest stretch goal is Tales of Cthulhu Invictus: Britannia, a fiction anthology which contains the last of my Macula and Damis stories, The Isle of The White Lady.

Readers may remember mystic talisman seller Damis of Nineveh and his bodyguard Macula’s printed adventures began in the first Cthulhu Invictus anthology with The Unrepeatables, and continued in The Apotheosis of Osirantinous .

This story sees Damis and Macula returning to frontier Britannia where they first met, to confront a terrible threat drifting south on winds of freezing snow.

Here’s an excerpt…
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Modius Macula had never suspected he would return to the grey, rain-soaked hills of Britannia, let alone to the dismal little vicus of Vindolanda itself. Yet here he was, leaning in the doorway of a shabby tavern, watching the Tungrian auxiliaries march east along the Stanegate Road.

He closed his eyes and listened to the clink of the auxiliaries’ gladii. Preparations for Antoninus Pius’ invasion of the Caledonian Lowlands were in full swing. The new stone fortress at Corsopitum was nearly complete, and the Vindolanda garrison was lending three hundred men to the coming campaign.

It was unseasonably cold for Martius.

Macula drew his woollen cloak closer about his shoulders. He felt the keen pangs of a veteran among young soldiers too busy to think him anything other than some faceless, idle civilian. This dredged up in him the old envy of the fighter whose campaigns had ended.

He heard a prolonged, deep cough from behind, and glanced at the table where his employer, the venerable Damis of Nineveh, sat hacking into his balled fist. He should never have allowed his friend to make this journey.

Damis should have been in Rome making a killing off graven images of the newly deified Empress Faustina in his talisman shop on the Vicus Cesaris, but the old Assyrian had been plagued by disturbing, prophetic nightmares since the start of the year.

“A terrible doom is moving, Macula,” Damis had moaned one night in a sweat. “I saw a strange grey flame consuming all Britannia. Over everything it passed it left a blanket of white ash. It spread to Rome herself. Apollonius took me up to stand on the orb of the Moon. I saw the whole world smoking like a ball of pitch.”

Being a Pythagorean, Damis had never been one to dismiss a dream, particularly when his late master, Apollonius of Tyana was involved.

Twenty years ago, while touring the province with Hadrian, Damis had stopped an incursion of foul little creatures that still slashed their way through Macula’s nightmares by negotiating a peace between Rome and an isolated sub-tribe of Christian Brigantes. Part of that peace had involved the secret installation of talismans in the milecastles along the border wall, to keep the things from migrating south.

Damis had petitioned the Emperor for permission to journey north to Britannia and inspect the eighty talismans. Pius had finally issued him an imperial assessor’s writ.

They had travelled thirty nine inclement miles between Maia and Vindolanda this past week. They’d found none of the talismans disturbed so far, but the intensity of Damis’ nightmares had increased. He slept little. Macula attributed it to a fever the old Assyrian had contracted from exposure to the chilly northern weather.

Macula watched the last of the auxiliaries pass up the road, drained his dregs, and rejoined Damis.

“You look like shit, old man,” he observed.

“Forthright as ever,” Damis grinned weakly.

That the old Assyrian had survived this journey at all Macula could only attribute to his Pythagorean diet and asceticism. Yet it was clear Damis had reached his limit.

“You can’t take another week of this. Let’s go to the valetudinarium.”

“Submit myself to the proddings of some Greek-hating alcoholic army bone cutter?” Damis shook his head. “No, just some warm colostrum, I think. Then we can be on our way again.”

“We should rest until the weather warms,” Macula said.

“The weather will never warm,” said a voice with a thick Brythonic accent. A youth stood over them, in a robe of dingy white sackcloth, dirty blonde hair dangling from beneath his hood.

Macula held up his cup.

“More beer, boy,” Macula growled. “And a word of advice. It’s not polite to insinuate yourself into a private conversation.”

“Are you Damis of Nineveh?” the youth asked, ignoring Macula.

Damis looked up.

“Do you know me?”

“I’m Gildas, son of Driskell, smith of the Textoverdi.”

“Tex-to-ver-di,” Damis repeated slowly.

“You came here one dark night, when I was a boy,” said Gildas. “You took shelter in my father’s hut.”

Macula looked hard at the young man now, going over the coincidence in his mind. He had just been thinking of that dark night twenty years ago, when he and Damis had hid in a Brigante roundhouse near here. He still remembered the smell of unwashed bodies and peat fire, and vaguely, the frightened eyes of a dingy little boy peering out behind the skirt of his mother.

“I remember,” said Damis. “Please.”

Gildas sat between them.

“The Bishop of Albion, Josaphus ben Joseph, was killed that night,” Gildas went on, in a conspiratorial tone. He looked about quickly, then took from his tunic a rude bit of wood shaped into a fanciful representation of a fish; an icthys, the sign of the Christians.

Macula remembered Josaphus too; a priest of that Jewish sect, slain by an overexcited centurion. Before dying, Josaphus had taught Damis the charm that now warded every mile of the Wall.

“This was his?” Damis said, reaching out to touch the holy symbol.

“The very one,” Gildas confirmed, returning it to his tunic.

“Has the Wall failed?” Damis asked anxiously, gripping Gildas’ upper arm.

“Against that which threatens Britannia now, it could never hope to stand,” said Gildas, producing a leather pouch from his cloak.

As he undid the strings, Damis and Macula leaned closer to see.

Gildas removed a small wooden box from the pouch, and from that, using the folds of the leather, he gingerly lifted out a foggy white stone with a bright purple glow in its center. He set it on the table.

“Some kind of jewel?” Macula asked.

Damis touched it, but recoiled and hissed, jamming his fingers into his mouth. He stared in shock at Gildas, then drew the sleeve of his tunic over his hand, as though he were touching a pan hot from an oven, and held the stone up to the lamplight.

There was a purple flower perfectly preserved in the center.

“Ice,” Damis said in hushed awe. “Ice that does not melt. So cold, it burns.”

“A Caledonian was found with this, on the banks of the Verda,” said Gildas, “skin blackened, half-frozen. Before he died, he spoke of a living light moving south, like the pillar of flame that guided the Hebrews. Anything caught by it, anything that breathes in the air, animals, men, even the birds of the sky,” he snapped his fingers and stabbed at the frozen flower. “Like this.”

“What is it?” Damis mumbled.

“Bishop Alain believes Satan is marching up from the coldest depths of hell, to punish those who have strayed from Christ,” said Gildas.

Macula was vaguely aware that Satan was a vindictive underworld god in the Christian pantheon.

“Have you strayed?” Damis asked.

Damis was no Christian, but the cult was something of a hobby for him.

Like most good Romans, Macula didn’t care overly for Christians. Jews were at least tolerable in that they kept their unbearable self-righteousness to themselves. Macula had mashed the nose of a zealot named Justin when the fanatic had tried to lead a frothing mob to vandalize the talisman shop over some heretical symposium Damis had hosted there with his mind-numbingly loquacious Christian philosopher friends Valentinus, Marcion, and Cerdo.

Yet by his own adventures with Damis, he knew the Christian god was as real as any other.

“Some of us have begun worshipping the old goddess Satiada again,” said Gildas, “with blood sacrifices led by a strange White Lady. Bishop Alain says that Satiada is a name by which Satan goes, and that the White Lady is the Whore of Babylon.”

That, at least, sounded interesting to Macula.

“My father told me you were a very wise man,” Gildas finished. “When I learned you had returned, I had to find you. Will you help?”

Macula grimaced over the boy’s shoulder and shook his head furiously at Damis.

“Macula,” said Damis, “it is nearly the start of the campaign season. How many of the provincial legions has Lollius Urbicus committed to the drive against the Caledonians?”

Macula lowered his eyes. All along the Wall the talk among the soldiers had been about the governor’s preparations for Pius’ expansion of the northern border.

“All three,” he said. Nearly fifteen thousand men, to say nothing of auxiliaries. He had an image of those men encased in ice like this purple flower.

“I don’t want to die in Britannia, old man,” Macula sighed.

Heroes Of Red Hook Kickstarter Is Live

Golden Goblin Press, whose anthologies Tales Of Cthulhu Invictus and Tales of The Caribbean published my Lovecraftian stories The Unrepeatables and Gods of The Grim Nation respectively, have a brand new book coming out, Heroes of Red Hook – a very worthy project conceived by owner and editor Oscar Rios as a response to the unfortunate racism inherent in HP Lovecraft’s works and co-edited by Brian Sammons.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/heroes-of-red-hook

I’ve approached the Mythos from a non-Anglo Saxon perspective a couple times in the past, with Crawlin’ Chaos Blues and Gods of The Grim Nation, so I jumped at the chance to be a part of a book like this, as did the following writers:

Glynn Owen Barrass

Juliana Quartaroli

Sam Gafford

Cody Goodfellow

Scott R. Jones

Vincent Kovar

Penelope Love

Tom Lynch

William Meikle

Christine Morgan

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire

Pete Rawlik

Paula R. Stiles

Sam Stone

Tim Waggoner

Mercedes M. Yardley

My entry, Beyond The Black Arcade, is a prequel to my previous Zora Neale Hurston story Gods Of The Grim Nation, and an indirect sequel to Lovecraft’s own The Call of Cthulhu. Zora, gathering folklore on hoodoo for her New York benefactress, submits to the tutelage of a famed New Orleans conjure man, who, as part of her initiation, takes her deep into the bayou to redress a wrong unwittingly perpetrated by Inspector Legrasse’s raid on a backwoods cult of Cthulhu in 1908. They discover an Indian father whose son has been abducted by winged creatures, who have born the boy to a strange, luminescent lake back in the swamp.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Luke Turner was an old, dark man with a Berber’s face and one blown out eye. I knew he was the genuine article because he was the only one of the five hoodoo doctors I had met to cuss me outright for a tourist rather than bob his head and call me ‘Miz Hurston’ when I floated the promise of recompense their way.

Doc Turner was an old hand at turning away the curious. He called me names Godmother Mason would blush to hear, and quoted me a rube’s price for tuition. I finally remarked that I wasn’t even sure he was on the level, and if he was truly her nephew, tell me something about Marie Leveau I didn’t already know, before I wasted my good money on another rounder with a deck of marked cards and a pair of writin’ slates.

Pride got the better of him then, and he stopped snarling and got up on his hind legs to howl.

“To know the Queen, you must know Hoodoo.”

“I know Hoodoo,” I lied. I knew some things. I knew about Goofer dust, and Conquerer Root, and I knew the ghosts of convicted murderers wandered blind because of the executioner’s hood.

He laughed lowly.

“You do not, but I will tell you.  God made the world we know with powerful words in six days and then rested. We live still on the seventh, waiting for Him to wake again. How many times the sun chase the moon, and always man look high and deep for them precious words and find none, until Moses. He was taught just ten, and them ten little words was enough to tear a nation out the side of Egypt.  But the Burning Bush would have blasted Moses to soot if he hadn’t been taught by Jethro, who knew the way of the Old One; the way of true Hoodoo.”

“The Old One?”

He leaned forward, and in the hazy light through the window, I saw something glitter on his finger. When he saw my eyes move to it, he covered one hand with the other and held my eyes.

“There was a snake in a hole right under the Lord’s footrest. The snake taught Jethro’s folks down in the deep blue places of the earth, and Jethro taught Moses. It put fire in his mind, clouds in his words; the words of making and unmaking. Lots of men, they can order things around. Moses could make.”

“Is this the snake got us booted from the Garden of Eden?” I asked.

“Not booted,” said Doc Turner with a thin, patient smile. “Freed. What’s a garden to a wildflower lookin’ down from a hill, but a prison?”

“So the Old One taught Moses the words, is the Devil?”

“Some call him Damballah. In the old times, Set. He is the godfather of man. He is Yig. He is my guide.”

“Will Yig guide me too?” I asked.

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I’m proud of this one and happy to be working with Oscar and Brian again. The story features some references not just to Lovecraft, but to my all-time favorite writer Robert E. Howard as well.

As mentioned, it’s also a return to writing Zora Neale Hurston in the role of a Lovecraftian protagonist. She’s a character I’m fast falling in love with writing, and one of the stretch goals of the kickstarter is a novella-length story featuring her, called King Yeller. In it, Zora is hired by the Federal Theater Project in New York City as a drama coach for up and coming young director Orson Welles’ all-black production of Macbeth. Except Welles, in typical upstart fashion, decides a quarter of the way through rehearsals that the cast will instead enact a production of a very rare and obscure play, The King In Yellow, which has just been provided to him by a mysterious benefactor….

So, if you wanna see the Yeller Sign through Zora’s eyes, be generous to this exciting project. You have till July 25th when the kickstarter ends.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/golden-goblin-press/heroes-of-red-hook